Jump directly to the Content
Jump directly to the Content

Sermon Illustrations

Home > Sermon Illustrations

40 Percent of Men on Dating Site Claim Genius Status

There's nothing wrong with thinking that you're smart. You probably are pretty smart, and we commend your healthy esteem and belief in yourself. But healthy self-esteem has its limits. Those limits were pushed a couple years ago, when dating website OkCupid revealed how thousands of its users had answered one particular question in a survey to measure partner compatibility: Are you a genius?

Amazingly, according to OKCupid's blogger Christian Rudder, two in five people (and nearly half of all men!) said yes to that question. Rudder said, "2 out of 5 think they are one in a thousand." Now, as there's no single scientific definition of "genius," Rudder's "one in a thousand" is kind of arbitrary. But to qualify for most high IQ societies—"genius clubs" like MENSA—you usually need to have an IQ at least in the 98th to 99th percentile. That's about one in a hundred. So there's something seriously wrong when 50 percent of men think they are geniuses.

Related Sermon Illustrations

High-Wire Walker on the Dangers of Invincibility

The Walk is the 2015 motion picture, and true story, about high-wire artist Philippe Petit. In 1974 he fulfilled his dream of walking between the World Trade Center towers, but in ...

[Read More]

You're Not as Virtuous as You Think

A 1961 research project asked ordinary people to send extremely painful electric shocks to a stranger. (Unbeknownst to the participants, the fake shocks were only delivered to an actor.) ...

[Read More]